10 great iPhone apps for foodies

Love all things food? Take a look at these tasty apps

Apple's newest phone, the iPhone 3G S, sold a million in the first weekend. With more than 50,000 apps on the market, which ones should you get to keep you well fed? According to tech leader PCMag.com, the best ones aren’t always the ones that are top rated on iTunes.

These 10 apps serve up the perfect restaurant recommendation, help find you a table, suggest the ideal wine for your meal, or even help you make better nutritional choices to get you back into shape:

1.) LocalEats (99 cents). This app lists the best 100 restaurants in each of the 50 largest U.S. cities. An individual entry includes an address and phone number, along with price and category information. You won’t find big chains; all the picks are small regional chains or stand-alone restaurants.

2.) Urbanspoon ($2.99). This app turns your iPhone into a slot machine to help you find a place to eat. Pick the neighborhood, cuisine type, and price then shake your phone to get a restaurant name. You can also browse or search to find what's nearby.

3.) Yelp (free). Craving Cajun in Cleveland? Yelp uses your handset's GPS capability to deliver information and candid reviews for nearby restaurants, bars and businesses so you know what to expect before you sit down.

4.) VegOut Vegetarian Restaurant Guide ($2.99). When you're a vegetarian, scoring great food in an unfamiliar place is like winning the lottery. VegOut's results are star-rated and can be filtered to include vegan-only, vegetarian, or vegetarian-friendly choices.

5.) OpenTable (free). This lets you search eateries for available reservations by entering the date and time you want to eat, along with your preferred cuisine, price range, and number of people. You can secure the reservation, view menus and get directions straight from the app.

6.) Tipulator (99 cents). Eating out is a blast -- that is, until the bill comes. Find out who owes what by entering the total, calculate the tip, and split it among as many people as you specify.

7.) 160,000 Recipes -- BigOven (free). Use your iPhone to make a killer meal. BigOven's app includes all sorts of recipes, each with a color photo of the finished product. You can search by recipe or specific ingredient, or simply browse for inspiration. Or just shake your phone and get a random recipe.

8.) Pocket Cocktails Drinks & Wine (99 cents). This elegant app shows hundreds of cocktails to make your mouth water. Find drinks by category (martinis, classics, or shooters, to name a few), or browse an alphabetical list. Or try the pocket sommelier: Tell it the menu and it'll suggest wines that pair well with it.

9.) Fast Food Calorie Counter ($2.99). This app will help you make better choices on the go with nutritional info for 6,000 menu items from 55 top fast food restaurants.

10.) Calorie Tracker by Livestrong.com ($2.99). This app turns your iPhone into a mobile fitness machine. Track your daily food intake and find calorie counts from a database of more than 525,000 entries. Record your daily exercise along with how many calories you've burned, based on your body weight.

2 comments so far...

Intuition (www.iconapps.com) is not actually an app for food but I just like to add it here because I love their grocery-listing feature! It is actually fun checking the list. Like it or not, this to-do app is free so nothing to waste.